


Fighting with Myself

by stardustedknuckles



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Beau's a little bit of a dick, Canon Compliant, Control Issues, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Pre-Relationship, but she's working on it, post-stone coffin fight, pre-kamordah visit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-25
Updated: 2020-10-25
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:22:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27185843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stardustedknuckles/pseuds/stardustedknuckles
Summary: Yasha is still hung up on hurting Beau, and Beau is ready to scream because it's not what happened that hurts, it's that Yasha won't talk to her - is actively avoiding her. And she's had it. But while the thought of heading back to Kamordah has her feeling out of control, Yasha has just been handed control of her own life for the first time in a long time. There is much to discuss.Some misdirected anger leading to talking, ft. everyone's favorite not-actually-a-therapist and Beau's inability to grasp yet just how much impact growing in Kamordah has had on her.
Relationships: Beauregard Lionett & Yasha, Beauregard Lionett/Yasha
Comments: 9
Kudos: 156





	Fighting with Myself

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes there's something approaching plot. Sometimes I just want to explore two sides of a coin through some awkward conversation.

Beau woke up angry.

And scared, and a little sad, but those didn't translate into anything useful so she shoved them down and focused on the anger as she made her way downstairs to find Jester and Caduceus at the table. Nearby, Caleb sat bent over a pile of books while Veth cleaned her crossbow and Fjord sipped a cup of tea and watched the overcast sky.

It was morning? Probably? Fuck this stupid city and the way it fucked up her sleep/wake cycle. Fuck all of this. Especially fuck the dull throb of a reminder that was perched in the back of every waking moment, whispering _you're going back to Kamordah_.

"Oh hi, Beau!" Jester chirped.

Beau snapped her thoughts back. "Where's Yasha?" Her voice came out about as harsh as she felt, and she saw the hurt flash across Jester's face, filed it away and let the shame of it stoke the anger.

Caduceus spoke up. "I think she's still her room."

Beau snorted. "Figures." She wanted to hit something. Or be hit, maybe. It was hard to tell sometimes, but it was stronger than it had been in months. The root of that, at least, she had no trouble identifying.

Jester was looking at her with those big eyes - no anger, just sympathy that scorched through the middle of Beau. "She's still really upset," she said quietly. Her eyes dropped to Beau's scar where it peeked out above her top, healed but still reddened and prominent. "I don't think she knows what to do and she's giving you space."

Right. She was out here having daddy issues while one of her closest friends was dealing with actively trying to kill her while locked in her own head - apparently dealing with it by trying to get Beau to hate her. "Oh yeah, being ignored after almost dying is real fucking helpful." Beau could hear the snarl in her voice, knew distantly that she was being very unfair to the wrong people, but she couldn't seem to stop. "Maybe she should try talking to the person she's so worried about hurting."

Jester shrank away a little, and now the others were looking at her from the other room. Her chest hurt, and her fingers were starting to ache with how tight they were curled into her palms.

"I'm going back upstairs," she said. "I can't…nothing's coming out right. I'm gonna go talk to her."

"That's quite a sequence of logic," Caduceus commented lightly.

There was a "fuck you" dying to hurl itself across the room at him because he was right, but she'd already fucked up and hurt Jester and she had to get out of there, now. She forced herself to take the stairs at an even pace and keep her shoulders still until she was out of sight.

Fuck, she hadn't even remembered to grab food.

She knocked twice on Yasha's door and pushed it open before she could answer, which. She didn't look like she was making any move to do so anyway. She was sitting on the edge of her bed with her elbows on her knees, still dressed head to toe in her gear - including that wicked-looking breastplate that Beau didn't want to think to hard about. Had she taken any of it off in the days since she'd rejoined them?

She didn't seem surprised someone had come in, but she did seem to be caught off guard that it was her. "Beau," she said. "Hello." Her eyes had caught Beau's in initial surprise, but now they slid away and back to the distant floor. "Can I help you with something?"

Beau had intended to start this off differently, but something about the way Yasha wouldn't look at her was too familiar to her. When she was trying to make someone hate her, she was a brash asshole who did stupid shit. Yasha might be the implode to Beau's explode, but she knew the pattern when she saw it. "Shut the fuck up and fight me."

Yasha's gaze made its way slowly back to Beau's face, and Beau thrilled a little with it. She was asking for something dangerous, she knew, but the shape of it eluded her.

"Why would I fight you, Beau?"

"Because I said to." Beau's voice stayed even, but there was ice in it that she didn't try to hide. "You let some random pit fighter beat the shit out of you without a fight. No rage, no attempts to defend yourself. We all saw it, Yash."

Yasha's head turned away. "And you would like a turn?" She didn't sound resistant to the idea - in fact, she seemed relieved if anything.

Beau could hear herself breathing hard now, making up somehow for Yasha's stoic calm. Her heart was static, seizing and losing its shape and crackling under her ribs. "Everyone's telling me how _bad_ you feel," she spat. "Except you. You're just avoiding me. I've fucking had it."

She peered a little at Beau now through the veil of her hair. Only her purple eye was visible when she said, "Would you like me to try and apologize to you directly?" Her voice was quiet but firm. She really would try it, Beau knew it as clearly as she knew she could never handle it - as well as she knew it wasn't the right fucking answer.

"Don't fucking bother." She saw Yasha flinch away a little, and some small, twisted part of her liked it. "You owe me a fight," Beau said. "A real one, rage and all. No holding back."

Yasha hesitated. "Okay," she said. She stood up and turned to the window. "We could go out that way."

Beau jerked her head at the greatswords leaning against the wall. "With Skin Gorger."

"No."

"Yes." Beau let her anger roll out from her and stared Yasha down in spite of their height difference. There was a tense to Yasha's shoulders that hadn't been there a moment before.

Good, they were getting somewhere.

"I won't hurt you again." Yasha's words left no room for argument, but that had never stopped Beau before.

"What the fuck do you think ignoring me is doing?"

Yasha blinked once. "I don't understand." Her eyes slid to Beau's scar in the dim light, jumped away again as though stung. "I hurt you grievously. Every time I see that scar, I will remember what I did to you."

"So fight me, and the next time this happens I'll have a better shot at getting out of your way." She'd hit Yasha a little harder than she opened her mouth intending to. She saw it in the way Yasha's face went a little blank, like Beau had only confirmed something she already believed.

"Rationalize it however you need to," Beau snarled, "but you're not the only one in this equation and I'm telling you: you owe me a real fight."

Yasha's fingers where they gripped above her elbows looked white. "I can't hurt you again."

Beau spared a half a second to take note of the small change between sentences, but it wasn't something she had room to process right now. "You can't just make decisions based on how you think I should be acting." As she said it, she could the truth of it - at the end of the day, something about that statement was the seed of this rage. _Kamordah, Kamordah_. She wasn't done yet, was vaguely aware that she might be undoing some of the work that had happened in the time Yasha had been gone.

Well that was fine, wasn't it? Yasha hadn't been there to see it anyway. To her, this was just regular Beau. She didn't have to pretend to be better. "You need to get the shit beat out of you so you can feel better, I'm ready to take you on," she said. "I don't hold back, and you don't either. You got it?"

"I…"

"Do. You. Got it."

Yasha eyed Skin Gorger with a deep unease that for a moment almost looked like panic. "If I do, will you stop being mad at me?"

How did she not get that Beau wasn't mad? Well, hadn't been. She was _now_ , sure, but for reasons that she couldn't quite hold onto and made it worse. "I'm not making promises I can't keep, Yash." She ignored the way Yasha nodded like she'd expected that, like it hurt just as much as she'd braced for. "But I'm not gonna sit here and watch you self-destruct over something that involved me when you won't let me have a say in it."

Yasha looked her full in the face for a long moment. There was no warmth there. No coldness, either. Whatever Yasha was looking at had very little to do with Beau.

Beau steadfastly ignored the growing sense that she might not be looking at Yasha either.

"Okay," Yasha said. Decision made. She nodded to Beau's hands. "Get wrapped up. I'll meet you in half an hour under your window."

A shiver of something coarse and jagged in Beau. "Yeah," she said. "Fine."

****************

Beau took her time wrapping her hands, cross legged on her bed and facing away from the door. She wasn't necessarily surprised when someone knocked, but the footfalls that preceded it surprised her. Caduceus wasn't usually one to go looking for places to stick his furry nose.

"What."

The door opened, because she would have told him to fuck off if she wanted him to and he knew it, and he nudged it closed again behind him before crossing to sit so that they were next to each other but facing away. 

"I couldn't help but overhear your conversation."

"If you've got a lecture, cram it."

He seemed puzzled. "Do I often?"

Beau exhaled, let her spine and shoulders relax a little. "No," she said. "That wasn't fair of me."

"It's understandable though, I think." Beau didn't have an answer for that, so he continued after a moment. "It's also understandable that two people used to enduring violence for missteps would seek it from each other to process."

Beau stiffened. "How do you know what I'm used to?"

She resisted the urge to shrug him off when he touched his shoulder to hers very lightly. "You spend enough time with people, you start seeing patterns in behavior."

"You lived in a graveyard until like seven months ago."

He nodded. "It's easier to make sense of people when you only ever see them at their worst."

She hadn't thought of that. Everyone who came to his family was dealing with a whole bunch of shit that made it hard to keep it together. He probably did know a lot.

It bothered Beau that she could look at the way she felt right now and compare it to a week ago and see the shortfall. A day ago, even. They were going back to Kamordah, and it was going to singlehandedly undo everything if she didn't get a grip.

Caduceus pulled her out of her thoughts, reaching over to set a small cloth bundle in Beau's lap. "I warmed these up for you."

"Bread?" Beau asked stupidly.

He nodded. "You missed breakfast."

Beau eyed the bundle skeptically even as her fingers rested atop the cloth, soaking in the warmth. "Is it like…secret magic bread that heals people after they get the shit beat out of them?"

He chuckled. "Nah, it's just bread. I've found it's very difficult to be angry and eat bread at the same time."

Beau's stomach dropped a little. "I don't mean to be rude," she said, which was weirdly true, "but I kind of think we're both looking to be angry."

Unexpectedly, his face broke into a soft smile. "That's a great thing for you to realize going in," he said warmly. "Anger is a choice as much as peace. Neither are necessarily wrong, in context." He patted Beau's hand where it rested over the bundle. "Save it for after, if you like."

Beau swallowed an unexpected lump forming somewhere down deep. "Okay." He stood up to leave, and she called after him before she could chicken out. "Hey Caduceus?"

He turned. "Hmm?"

"Why'd you bring it to me and not Yasha?"

"What do you mean?"

She shrugged uncomfortably. "Just. Between the two of us, you know. You'd run less risk of getting your head taken off by Yasha than me, and you already knew I'm angry and looking for a fight. I was a bitch to Jester over nothing."

He tilted his head. "I don't see why that should make you any more dangerous to approach," he said. "You wouldn't intentionally hurt me, any more than Yasha would hurt you. I knew what I might find." His tail twitched, though in amusement or embarrassment it was hard to tell. "Besides, Yasha's already outside."

Beau huffed and waved him off. After a moment of staring at the bread, she opened her knapsack and carefully packed in the warm bundle.

****************

When she poked her head over her balcony, Yasha was standing below it with her arms crossed. She glanced up at the sound of the window closing, but said nothing as Beau dropped down with a landing that was only a little for show. She started walking without preamble, trusting that Beau would catch up.

As they walked, Beau felt the tinge of unease that had crept in while talking with Caduceus begin to morph into something full-blown and oppressive inside of her. The bread was warm on her back, a persistent reminder of their conversation. Were they both looking to be angry, really? Beau knew she was - that she had been - but she also knew that Caduceus had highlighted for her a path of thought that felt suspiciously connected to a lot of shit she wasn't sure she had it in her to unbury and look directly at.

At first, she thought Yasha would just keep walking when she stopped. They were almost out of the firmaments, in a secluded section of the gardens. There were benches, trees with invitingly scooped branches. Dim light poured from small boxes of colored glass that peeked from under the mulch and between flowers and bushes.

"Are you coming?" She had stopped about 20 feet ahead of Beau, expression unreadable from both the dark and the hood covering the top part of her head.

Beau sighed and pushed her own hood off, shrugging her knapsack from her shoulders and taking a seat on one of the wide benches. "I need to talk to you," she said.

Yasha inclined her head. "I thought you wanted to fight."

"I still might," Beau agreed. "But not like this. Will you sit?"

Yasha would have been completely within her rights to tell her to fuck off, she knew, so it was with relief that she watched Yasha hesitate and then move closer, pushing her own hood back. She sat carefully next to Beau, leaving space enough for a third person between them. For a long moment they just sat and listened to the breeze through the trees, the distant sounds of people making their way to the Shadowspire several hundred feet away. It was peaceful our here, even if Beau did still miss the sense of daylight.

When Yasha finally spoke, her words were guarded but as gentle as they always were. "This is most unlike you," she said. After a second, "or it was."

Beau looked at her - really looked. Yasha's eyes were lined with exhaustion, the bruising around one of them still visible from her fight two days prior. Her face paint looked smudgy even in the low light, like she'd scrubbed off blood and hadn't bothered to touch it back up. More than all of that, she looked sad in a way that was all at once familiar and carried with it something new.

"It still is," Beau said. "Unlike me, I mean. You didn't…" she hesitated. "We didn't move on without you, you know."

Yasha reached gently for a flower growing up close to her knee, traced its shape with her fingers. "You had every reason to." There was no self-pity, just fact as Yasha saw it. "You had no way of knowing what side I was on. Most days, even I didn't know." She turned to Beau. "All of that just to be brought down at my hands."

Beau braced herself for a flare of anger, but all she found was sadness. "Don't flatter yourself," she said, smiling a little. "Caduceus wasn't gonna let anything happen to either of us."

Yasha's hand drifted from the flower to the back of her neck. "You couldn't have known that." Her voice hardened a bit. "You were dying. I saw you. The fact that Caduceus was there to prevent it doesn't change that I would have killed you and felt nothing."

Beau blinked. "Yeah it does. It changes everything. He was there, I didn't die, and you got set free from the sadistic motherfucker who actually tried to kill me." Yasha didn't reply, just kept her hand pressed to her neck. "Yash," Beau said quietly. She looked over, eyes resting somewhere around Beau's knee. "The first thing you did with your own will was to heal me."

"From the effects I caused." She did look at Beau now, but it was hard to tell in the dark whether she was really seeing her yet or still looking inwards. "I don't get it," she said. "You were mad half an hour ago. That made sense. That was something…I know how to deal with you wanting to fight me."

Beau sighed and opened her knapsack. "I was never angry at you. Not for what happened at the chantry." She pulled out the little bundle and her water skin, set the bag aside. She kept her eyes on the cloth, unfolded it crease by crease as she spoke. "I was mad earlier, you're right," she said, "but I don't think it had much to do with you." She picked up a loaf of warm bread and held it out to Yasha.

Yasha looked at it uncertainly, but Beau had figured out that the "you" caduceus mentioned missing breakfast had included them both, and finally she took it. "You said you were mad because…I was avoiding you?"

There were coming up fast on a conversation Beau wasn't sure she was ready to have yet, and was not ready yet to fuck this up. "Yeah," she said. "It just…" she shifted the lens of approach they were taking. Maybe if she felt less like she had to talk or risk losing this fragile connection, it would be a little easier. "Caduceus came in while I was getting ready." She took a bite of the bread, relished the way the crust resisted and then cracked to let out more warmth and its comforting smell.

Yasha was smiling just a little. "That explains the bread, then. I was wondering."

Beau took advantage of the break in tension to give Yasha her most exaggerated offense. "I could have made it, it's not impossible."

Yasha took her first bite, some of the tension going out of her shoulders. "Certainly not impossible," she agreed, "but highly unlikely. I assume he said something?"

Beau nodded. "I don't even think he knows what he's saying half the time. Like how deep it really goes."

"I know what you mean," Yasha said softly. "He came in yesterday to me," she explained when Beau raised an eyebrow.

Beau huffed a little, took a sip from her skin. "He tell you to give me space too?" She saw Yasha tense just a little. Fuck. "Sorry," she said quickly. "I wasn't actually trying to be a shit. You don't have to tell me."

"It's fine," Yasha said softly. "He actually said something really weird."

Relieved she hadn't destroyed the fragile conversation, Beau huffed a laugh. "Say it ain't so."

She was rewarded by a soft smile from Yasha before she continued. "He said that sometimes, having too many choices can feel like the same as having none at all. That it was only natural to be rusty on the idea of potential." She eyed the half a loaf left in her hand. "I didn't really understand what that means, but that thing you said a minute ago. About the first thing I did…"

"That was a choice you made yourself, yeah," said Beau.

Yasha took another bite of bread. "That's hard for me to understand," she said after a moment. "It didn't feel like a choice, it felt like the thing to do."

"You could've done a million things that weren't that," Beau pointed out. "Everyone else was prepared to keep going immediately. Jester had me back up, there were things that needed doing…nobody would have thought twice about you going along. Including me."

"It doesn't feel like I could have done anything else," Yasha said quietly.

Beau nudged her water skin towards Yasha, pleased when she picked it up and drank from it after a confirming nod. She felt the edges of the hard conversation pressing up again inside of her, took a deep breath. "I'm a big believer in choice," she said, because that seemed a safe enough place to start. There was a little green cube giving off light right behind the bench, and she let her eyes rest on the soft and vibrant color as she continued. "It's never been something I've had to wonder about. From day one, it's felt like…everyone's got ideas for what I should do and who I should be."

"Is that so bad?" Yasha asked quietly.

Beau knew it wasn't a question directed at her specifically, but a spark of panic still climbed its way into her throat as she looked up at Yasha. "Yes. It is."

Yasha was looking at her too, now, in a way that left no doubt as to who she was seeing. "Was it bad, what they wanted you to be?"

Beau huffed and looked away helplessly. "It wasn't the thing they wanted me to do that was bad. It was the way it didn't matter what I wanted." Her fingers played with the corners of the napkin, worrying its hem and tugging softly over and over. "I don't think they planned on me wanting anything other than what they had in mind to give me," she said. "And that's about as much as I can say. Choice matters. My say - and yours - matter. That's all."

The silence that fell between them was uncomplicated and amicable in spite of the tense conversation that had ushered it in. Beau was grateful for this, the way Yasha seemed to understand it too.

"I think I see the difference," Yasha said after a while. Beau looked from the tree she had been lost in thought staring at to Yasha curiously. "I don't think I know what it is to want." There was an odd, soft smile on her face as she said it, and somehow it didn't look out of place.

"What do you mean?" How was it possible to not want? Beau was made of want. It was her will against the world - her whole life was a series of wants, her whole challenge as a person to tame them and make sure they only became problems for the people who deserved it.

Yasha considered. "It has not served me, to want. The few times I have, it…things have ended poorly." Her eyes fell to the flower at her knee, waving gently in the slow breeze. "At a certain point, it is easier to be told what you are for. It…hurts less."

Beau felt stunned. "Yash…" She didn't know what to do, found the prospect of being without want - so fundamentally without will…hold on. "That's bullshit," she said. Yasha blinked at her. "You want stuff all the time." She pointed to the last piece of bread in Yasha's hand. "Good food." To the swords on her back. "To protect your friends." She pointed to the bench. "To have this conversation." She felt riled up a little - not angry, just intense. "You make choices based on wants, and you know how to want. You don't know how to _choose_."

Yasha ate her last piece of bread, pondering. "That's a lot to take in. You sound like Caduceus."

"Take that back."

They both laughed, and then silence for just a moment.

"We can still fight," Beau said. "If you want."

Yasha looked perplexed. "I'm…okay if we do or don't?"

"So don't look at it that way." This was territory Beau was comfortable in. Emotions and digging through bad shit? No thanks. Figuring out what steps to take towards making something better? She had that shit on lock. "Like, would a fight make you feel good, or would it make things worse?"

Yasha shrugged apologetically. "I like spending time with you," she said. "It all sounds good."

Beau felt her face erupt into flames and was thankful for the dark until she realized it didn't make a difference to Yasha's vision and turned away. "Cool," she squeaked. "That's a place to start." She cleared her throat, ignored the way Yasha was looking at her with a soft, confused smile. "How are you feeling about going and getting the shit kicked out of you again, is the real question."

"Complicated," Yasha said almost immediately.

"What sounds good about it?"

Yasha frowned. "Penance, I think."

"I'd buy that if I hadn't spent so much time with Caleb." She slid the folded cloth back into her bag and slipped it on. "Unfortunately for you, I have and so I know that shit never stops, so you're out of luck there." She stood, offered her hand. "Walk with me?"

Yasha took it and rose. "Where we going?"

"Back to the house. We can cool off, talk to our friends, plan a fight somewhere there's daylight if you still want to. That alright?"

Yasha considered. "I am alright with waiting," she decided.

Beau made a noncommital noise and didn't miss that Yasha had not let go of her hand. It was that knowledge that gave her the courage to speak up. "Hey Yasha?" She saw her turn her head. "Penance is for people who don't know what forgiveness is. And I already forgave you."

Yasha looked quietly down at the ground. "I can't forgive myself," she said. "But I won't keep avoiding you and hurting you more just to prove to myself that I am not worth it."

There was a lump in Beau's throat, and she had no idea why. She swallowed hard. "I don't think we get a say in who forgives us," she said quietly. She thought of Jester, who deserved an apology even if she'd never ask for one from Beau, of Caduceus who had come into her room prepared for friendly fire.

Yasha's voice was equally soft. "I think that's terrifying."

Beau nodded, squeezed her fingers gently. "Believe me, I know. It's not my choice." She blew out a breath. "But forgiving myself is, so that makes it a little easier."

The trees sighed overhead as they walked; from here, Beau could already see the lights of the tree on their roof. It made her smile a little to consider spending the morning - afternoon? Who knew anymore - with her friends, and even though she still felt bad for being a dick to Jester, she knew she could make that okay too.

"Beau?"

Yasha hadn't stopped walking entirely, but her steps faltered as Beau turned. "Yeah?"

Yasha's mouth worked for a moment. "How?" She finally asked.

Beau stepped closer, moved her fingers so that they were interlaced with Yasha's while she looked on in soft puzzlement. "I don't really know," Beau confessed. "I think it's different for everyone, and I'm bad at this stuff."

"I disagree," Yasha said softly. "You are a wise person, Beau."

The blush the crawled up Beau this time was gentler, filtering in by degrees. "I dunno what the magic key is for you," she said to Yasha. "But I know I want to be around to help if you stay."

Yasha smiled softly. "There's that want again. Do you think that has anything to do with it?"

They started walking again with no particular consensus. "Probably," said Beau. "But if that's too hard, maybe start with not wanting. All that guilt and stuff."

Yasha nodded pensively. "That feels like an okay place to start."

"Good." Beau tugged on her hand playfully. "Now quit asking me hard questions for a while and let's go take a bath with everyone or something. Maybe get you some fresh paint for your face?"

"Oh," Yasha said, reaching up to touch her forehead. "I guess that would be nice, yes."

Beau inhaled. "Do you want me to help you?"

"Yes." Yasha seemed to have surprised herself with how quickly she answered. "Is that alright?"

Beau grinned, breath falling out of her in relief. "Yeah. You're gonna be fine."


End file.
